Installation on Neovim

[Mouarius]

Here are some insights of my personal experiences installing the django-language-server in Neovim.

As described in the documentation, the basic setup with Lazy.nvim involved starting with this :

-- basic setup from the documentation
{
  "joshuadavidthomas/django-language-server",
  dependencies = {
    "neovim/nvim-lspconfig",
  },
  config = function(plugin, opts)
    vim.opt.rtp:append(plugin.dir .. "/editors/nvim")
    require("djls").setup(opts)
  end,
}

But it didn't work right away with the server being installed globally, in my lsp logs I was getting errors about modules that cannot be found to initialize the Django project :

[ERROR][2025-04-18 09:22:46] ...lsp/handlers.lua:562	"Failed to initialize Django project: ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'backports'"

I guess this was because the process was unable to locate the packages in my project virtual env, even though I had launched nvim with my venv sourced. Maybe this is linked to this issue #69 ?

So the first thing I had to do is to install django-language-server in my venv as a project dev dependency.

Then I still had en error at startup :

[ERROR][2025-04-18 09:39:14] ...lsp/handlers.lua:562	"Failed to initialize Django project: ImproperlyConfigured: Requested setting LOGGING_CONFIG, but settings are not configured. You must either define the environment variable DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE or call settings.configure() before accessing settings."

Pretty self explanatory : I need to set the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE env variable for the server process. So I updated my configuration to do so.

Here is my final configuration, I don't know if its the best, but it works right now. I would be happy to hear your personal thoughts and tips about it. Maybe I'm missing something !

return {
 'joshuadavidthomas/django-language-server',
 dependencies = {
   'neovim/nvim-lspconfig',
 },
 config = function(plugin)
   vim.env.DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE = 'mysite.settings'

   vim.opt.rtp:append(plugin.dir .. '/editors/nvim')
   require('djls').setup {}
 end,
}